Contents

Rationale

The only concrete use case currently being solved by the audio attribute is muting the audio track by default.

About the spec note "A future version of this specification will probably introduce new values here, e.g. to control the default volume, or to select a default audio track":

Default volume could be controlled by a volume attribute reflected in defaultVolume.

Enabling/disabling tracks by default should ideally be solved by a similar mechanism for audio, video and text tracks. As such, it's unlikely that using the audio attribute would be a satisfactory solution.

Lacking any compelling future use cases for <video audio=muted>, reducing it to <video muted> is a simpler solution for muting, both for authors and implementors.

Details

Remove the audio attribute

Add a muted boolean attribute

Reflect muted as defaultMuted

Impact

Positive Effects

Simpler to implement and use.

Negative Effects

The muted attribute has to be reflected as defaultMuted, as the muted IDL attribute is already used for the effective muted state, rather than the default.

Conformance Classes Changes

Changes for UA's and validators.

Risks

If we eventually come up with lots of different audio-related setting that need to be settable in markup, we might end up with many different attributes reflected with non-optimal names, rather than a single attribute with space-separated tokens. (It's not obvious that this is a bad thing.)